The pugilist who wrote the story of America

He fought in the Second World War, stabbed one of his six wives in the neck and wrote some of the most acclaimed literature and journalism of the 20th century. As the tributes flowed last night for the man who led a new generation of writers, we chart an extraordinary and full-blooded life

Shortly after midday yesterday the news hit the wires: Norman Mailer, the fearless alpha male among American men of letters had died of renal failure early in the morning at the age of 84.

Now would come the final calling to account; not just for the literary legacy of a man who believed that 'a really great novel does not have something to say. It has the ability to stimulate the mind and spirit of the people who come in contact with it', but for a life he had lived on the margins of credibility, packed with so many fights, love affairs and downright violent feuds that it always threatened to overshadow his work.

Mailer, born on 31 January, 1923, in Long Branch, New Jersey, was to become for at least 40 years the patrolling silverback of the literary scene. He made his name at the age of 25 with the book The Naked and the Dead. This war novel, credited with the invention of the word 'fug' as a handy substitute profanity, was a critical and commercial success and remained at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for 11 weeks.

'When my first book, The Naked and the Dead, was published, it was like being shot out of a cannon. My life changed overnight,' Mailer once said. 'I was at the Sorbonne in Paris with my then wife, Beatrice, and my sister. I went into the American Express office and read a newspaper headline which said my book was a bestseller. It was a huge shock and very nice to behold. Willy-nilly I had become a celebrity.'

Most recently Mailer stirred both his fans and his detractors with the book The Castle in the Forest. Published early this year, it was his first book for a decade and in it he controversially created an imaginary childhood for Adolf Hitler.

The story, which is narrated by Dieter, a devil assigned by Satan to nurture young Adolf, was described in the Guardian as 'electrifying and peculiar' by author Beryl Bainbridge, who went on to write that: 'This unforgettable novel by a master of prose reinforces the belief that we kid ourselves if we lay the blame for hideous crimes on one single individual, even if it is the devil. We are all culpable.' Hitler was far from the first psychopath or megalomaniac to receive the Mailer treatment. Such characters held a mesmeric fascination for him.

In his journalism and novels he has profiled Lee Harvey Oswald, Gary Gilmore, the double murderer who was executed by firing squad, and Pablo Picasso. In later life he also misguidedly became the champion of a long-term prisoner named Jack Henry Abbott who, having published In the Belly of the Beast with Mailer's help, unfortunately reverted to his former behaviour after release and killed a man. The incident is believed to have profoundly affected Mailer. His all-time hero was Muhammad Ali, whose famous 1974 'Rumble in the Jungle' he covered from the ringside for Playboy. Two years later he wrote The Fight about Ali's encounter with George Foreman in Zaire and later recollected the fight once again in tranquillity with his customary panache in the Oscar-winning documentary When We Were Kings

The author, who married six times, was drawn to traditionally masculine topics and so was held to have been a worthy successor to the literary crown once worn by Ernest Hemingway, that other muscular prose writer and serial husband. There is only one woman who seems to have held Mailer's attention for any length of time, and that was Marilyn Monroe, the subject of his 1973 biography.

Mailer's death this weekend further depletes the macho intellectual roll call of great American writers, severely reduced in the past three years. Gone now are Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow and Mailer. Only Philip Roth remains from this school of Jewish storytellers.

Mailer has been a cultural icon since the 1950s. He is name-checked in the Woody Allen comedy Sleeper (1973) and in the John Lennon song 'Give Peace a Chance', and is mentioned in lyrics by artists as various as Simon and Garfunkel and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. A perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Mailer received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters of the National Book Foundation in 2005 and once even stood, albeit half-jokingly, for the role of mayor of New York.

He was accused by some of misogyny and worse, and admitted to charges of womanising and arrogance. Yet he has always also been fondly associated with the copper-bottomed, durable, literary anecdote and hailed for his comic turn of phrase. Only this year, as he waited to take part in a Q&A interview to be carried by Paris Review, he told how he had encountered Roth at a urinal during the memorial service for a mutual friend.

The two heavyweights discussed their shared inability to control their bladders. 'Phil, sometimes I have to go into a telephone kiosk to pee,' Mailer commented. 'You just can't wait at my age.'

'I know,' said Roth, 'it's the same with me.'

'Well,' Mailer told Roth, 74, 'you always were precocious.'

Mailer's death at Mount Sinai Hospital was announced by J. Michael Lennon, the author's official biographer and literary executor. The news has been met with glowing tributes from the world of letters and the millions of fans who have relied on Mailer's dyspeptic sensibility over the years as an intellectual touchstone.

Michiko Kakutani, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for the New York Times, wrote yesterday: 'In his best work Mr Mailer made America his subject, and in tackling everything from politics to boxing to Hollywood, from astronauts to actresses to art, he depicted - or tried to depict - the country's contradictions: its moralistic prudery and grasping fascination with celebrity and sex and power; the outsize, outlaw past of its frontier and its current descent into "corporation land", filled with cheap, consumer blandishments and the siren call of fame.'

Mailer himself won the Pulitzer Prize twice, once in 1968 for The Armies of the Night, his piece about his arrest on an anti-Vietnam war march, and once in 1979 for The Executioner's Song, his book on Gilmore, and he was almost as important a figure in journalism as he was in literature. Always a contender for the honour of being judged to have produced the elusive Great American Novel, he is thought by most critics to have narrowly missed this accomplishment.

His father, Isaac, was a South African-born accountant, while his mother, Fanny Schneider, ran a housekeeping and nursing agency. As a teenager young Norman had originally intended to get his hands dirty with oil rather than ink. After he attended Boys High School in Brooklyn, 'the most secure Jewish environment in America', Mailer entered Harvard University at 16 to study aeronautical engineering. He graduated with honours, but had an interest in writing. His short story 'The Greatest Thing in the World', written for the Harvard Advocate, won a college fiction prize.

Mailer was inducted into the army in March 1944 and his experience as a surveyor in the field artillery, as an intelligence clerk in the cavalry and as a rifleman with a reconnaissance platoon in the Philippine mountains, gave him the idea for The Naked and the Dead. It is still regarded as a classic Second World War novel and of the New Journalism school. His next two, less successful novels, Barbary Shore (1951) and The Deer Park (1955), were initially rejected by six publishers and so the young man turned his energies to journalism. He was among the founders of the fabled New York newspaper The Village Voice in 1954 and he wrote a weekly column for a time.

In 1959 a collection of essays and stories was published under the title Advertisements for Myself. The pieces tackled politics, sex, drugs, his own writing and the works of others and so marked out his territory for the next four decades.

Mailer regularly pushed himself to extremes. He smoked pot, attempted prize fighting and flew gliders. He was the father of nine children and, during the 1950s warmly embraced the emerging counterculture, along with other stars of the Beat Generation such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.

But it was during this period that his excesses nearly veered into tragedy. After returning from an all-night party with his second wife, Adele Morales, he stabbed her in the neck with a pen knife, nearly killing her. To the horror of her feminist supporters at the time, she decided not to press charges. They got back together after Mailer spent a short time being treated in a mental hospital, but were later divorced.

In a hit-or-miss relationship with Hollywood, Mailer wrote, produced, directed and acted in several films. Wild 90 (1967) was an adaptation of The Deer Park. Despite terrible reviews, it ran for four months at New York's Theatre de Lys. His second film, Beyond the Law (1968), received positive reviews but did not draw audiences, and his third film, Maidstone (1971), based on The Armies of the Night, received mixed reviews.

One of his longest-running battles was with the liberal thinker and writer Gore Vidal. Their dislike for each other often led to violence. In one of their tussles it seems that Vidal came off best. As Mailer threw a punch in his direction, Vidal is said to have quipped dryly: 'Lost for words again, Norman?'

Mailer returned to the novel with the publishing of An American Dream (1965) and Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), which was nominated for a National Book Award. His work in the Sixties amounted to the development of a hybrid literary form, a combination of fiction and non-fiction. Throughout the Seventies Mailer wrote prolifically, publishing a book on the Apollo 11 moon landing, Of a Fire on the Moon (1971) and The Prisoner of Sex (1971) as a response to the women's liberation movement;

He returned to the cinema to write a screenplay for his murder mystery novel Tough Guys Don't Dance and to direct it himself. He also wrote the script for the film version of The Executioner's Song, for which he received an Emmy nomination for best adaptation. Harlot's Ghost, an epic about the plottings of the CIA, was published in 1991.

At the end of his life he lived with his wife, Norris Church Mailer, in New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts. His youngest son, John Buffalo Mailer, 28, is their only child and he co-wrote a novel, The Big Empty, with Mailer.

Whether the son goes on to prove a solo talent, it is certain that we will hear no more from his father. Mailer famously ended his acclaimed novel Harlot's Ghost with the words 'To be Continued' and once said it was 'the dumbest three words I ever wrote'. Until now there was some hope he might be proved wrong.

Weighty words

On marriage

'First there's the affair, then the marriage, then children and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.'

On being an author

'Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.'

On Muhammad Ali

'There is always the shock in seeing him again. Women draw an audible breath. Men look down. They are reminded again of their lack of worth.'

On America

'America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug white Protestants who live in the centre, in the serene eye of the big wind.'

On journalists

'If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.'

On democracy

'A democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by travelling in a straight line until one is stopped.'